In summary, Gladwell talks about how we're all living in an age that's obsessed with success, with looking for ways to understand how talented people overcome their challenges. However, we rarely look at the way people fail. Why some people choke and others panic; if there's even a difference. And if there is, what do they say about us--about who we are and how we think?
After conducting numerous case studies, he concludes that choking is when, in times of stress, your explicit learning takes over your implicit learning. Explicit learning is something that happens within the realms of awareness. When you're first learning how to do something, and someone tells you the sequence in which to do it, you pick it up very quickly. You'll start off slow at first, but as you learn the pattern, you'll get faster and faster. Implicit learning, on the other hand, is when you pick something up outside the realms of awareness. No one tells you how to do it and you don't realize there is a pattern. You'll still pick it up just as fast, but this time unconsciously. Whether it's a sport or a math problem, you work it through in a very careful, mechanical way, but as you get better, your implicit system takes over. Eventually, you'll be doing it without even thinking.
These two systems are based on two different parts of your brain. Very separate traits. "The basal ganglia, where implicit learning partially resides, are concerned with force and timing, and when that system kicks in you begin to develop touch and accuracy, the ability to hit a drop shot or place a serve at a hundred miles per hour." Under conditions of stress, however, you revert back to the explicit system and you start thinking about how to do it again; you lose your touch. Even as a professional, you may revert back to a system you haven't relied on since you've been taught it--back to the streets of basketball, back as a Little Leaguer. You're choking.
Panicking, on the other hand, is something different altogether. Unlike choking, in which you're thinking too much, it's when you stop thinking. "Stress wipes out short-term memory. People with lots of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress suppresses their short-term memory they still have some residue of experience to draw on." However, when you panic, your mind draws a blank.
Panic also tends to cause something called perceptual narrowing. Under times of stress, your accuracy may not be affected, but your performance is only half as good because you tend to focus or obsess over one thing. For example--in the case that I, personally, cannot swim--you find yourself drifting away from the shoreline because the waves are too strong. Instead of realizing that kicking and screaming not only makes you swallow water but also weighs your body down, you're main focus is to stay above water by exerting as much energy as you can. As you're panicking, your mind fails to remind you that your body has the ability to float, especially in salt water.
I find myself intrigued in this topic of failure because it tells me that panicking and choking, something I used to use interchangeably, are worlds apart, bringing insight into why failure even happens. Sometimes, in times of an emergency, choking may actually be a good thing. Yes, you revert back to the external system in which you may perform much slower and less fluidly, but at least you're performing. Panicking reverts you back to instinct: to kick and scream above water. And sometimes, your instinct is just plain useless.
Panic, however, can also be a good thing in that it is conventional failure. Without a lot of experience, everyone has the ability to panic. It's explainable. If stress wipes out short-term memory, as mentioned before, then experience has the ability to wipe out panic. You know what's really funny though? Choking is paradoxical failure. Choking has less to do with who you are as a performer and more to do with the situation in which the performance takes place. And it's paradoxical because experience is exactly what doesn't work in your favor.
In a study about stereotype threat, Gladwell points out that under such conditions (i.e. a female interviewing for a man's job, a black student test-taking in a classroom full of white students) 'carefulness' and 'second-guessing' are methods the smartest people may use to bring them further away from intuition and quick processing and closer to failure. The best athletes sometimes fail, not because they're not experienced, but because they're actually good at what they do, and only those who care enough about their performance, and I mean really care, can break under pressure.
"...the ability to overcome the pressure of the spectators is part of what it means to be a champion. But the same ruthless inflexibility need not govern the rest of our lives. We have to learn that sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one."
So, the next time I tell myself to "calm down, be more careful, and think harder" I may consider that I might be prescribing myself the wrong formula for the specific condition at hand. I also don't need stress to govern my life. I am good at what I do because of the gifts given me. Work at it diligently yet joyfully, because we, humans, are fearfully and wonderfully made.
